The Future is Feline...

Apparently there's a threat going around. That women aren't having kids but instead are just living with cats and reading books. The joke is this is a strange threat as literally my favorite thing in the world is to be at home with my cats reading a really good book and not having to serve or provide for anyone (other than my cats, who deserve everything).

But what I didn't realize, is that this threat is uniquely American. And I guess I should have known this as it's always tied to some political social media post. I guess I don't even really know if it's a thing someone actually said, or if it's a thing someone said someone said so then they could look smart for ridiculing it.

But back to the Americaness of it. It seems that associating cats with intellectual women is a very American insult. I say this because one rainy evening I was in Istanbul and my husband and I went to a fish restaurant right at the base of the Galata Bridge.

Now this restaurant was not one that catered to tourists, and the guys at the door, because in Istanbul there are always guys at the door, made it very clear to us that the restaurant was "just fish".

We went inside the ramshackle building. I say it was a building, but it might have been an exterior wall someone had built a roof near and then put some plastic event tent walls on. The floor was an uneven multi tiered affair that was covered in astroturf. It wasn't heated, so they had big metal buckets full of burning charcoal scattered throughout the tables. The ceiling was covered in what looked like crab traps, buoys and plants, making the already cramped space a little more cramped.

My husband was immediately into the place, and our waiter walked us back to the fish counter where my husband was able to identify all the fish on sight. There was salmon, mackerel, seabream and more. My husband ordered us a fish he was excited about, some salad and some raki.

Raki is not my favorite, despite the fact that visually it's very fun. It tastes like black licorice, but comes out looking like water, until you pour water into it, then it becomes an incandescent, milky white. It seems to be Turkey's favorite alcohol, and every time my husband ordered it, the server would get really excited.

So we were sitting in this low ceilinged fish restaurant, next to a bucket of coals, drinking raki, and our fish got delivered. It was very good, and about halfway through my meal, I looked down and there was a grey tabby cat sitting between the burning bucket of coals and my feet.

Now, this cat, like every cat I'd seen in Istanbul, was very cute. Because Istanbul is full of cats, and I don't mean limpy strays who are struggling, I mean proud, healthy floofs whom the locals feed and take great pride in, the fact that a cat was in the restaurant didn't strike me as weird. But I wasn't sure if it would be looked down on if I fed him some fish. I mean, he'd clearly never eaten in his life, despite his lustrous coat, and I knew, there was no way I was not going to feed the cat.

"Hey," my husband said. "Don't feed that cat. They'll know you're a cat lady."

This was not the deterrent he thought it was, and I slipped the cat a little bit of fish. The cat gobbled it up but clearly needed more.

I continued to feed the cat until the waiter appeared. He was smiling at me, so I figured he wasn't mad I was feeding the cat. He nodded and smiled some more in that universal way that communicated, I don't speak your language, but we're cool. Then, from his sleeve, he produced two entire mackerels, which I knew had come from fish counter. The cat walked to the man. The man put out his non-fish bearing hand and the cat head butted it. The man nodded in delight and gave the cat the two fish. He then spread his hands at me, and I acknowledged the trick was absolutely stunning.

This was literally the best thing that I had ever seen in a restaurant.

"That wasn't really a trick," my husband said, after the waiter had walked away. "I mean, he acted like he'd trained the cat, but the cat just head butted his hand."

"That's how you train a cat," I said, giving the cat more fish because it was still clear that no one had ever fed him. "You find what they naturally do and then train them to do it to the stimulus you choose."

"The stimulus of, I have two mackerels in my other hand?" my husband said.

"Someone in that equation was trained," I said.

A few minutes later the waiter was back with two more mackerel, and after a great showing of head butting, the cat got another two mackerel, and my husband and I acknowledged the trick was still amazing. We continued to eat until the fish and the raki were gone, and after a third delivery of mackerel to the cat, the cat eventually wandered off.

"This is kind of your town, isn't it?" My husband said. "I mean, no one cares that you're infected with cat parasites. Everyone is."

I looked back at our waiter, who was sitting with a few other guys from the restaurant by the front door. They were smiling and watching the cat, who was now sitting by a different bucket of coals.

"Yeah, it's nice here," I said.

And this isn't to say emulating Turkey is the cure for American politics, it certainly isn't, but after watching our male waiter show off the head butt trick three times, it made me wonder. Do we need more cats on the senate floor? What would it be like if both sides, despite their communication problems, could communicate through the universal language of, watch my cat's cool trick. And then upon watching the cat's cool trick, the other side of the aisle clapped and recognized that was a cool trick.

Is peace as easy to obtain as a few fish up your sleeve and a stray cat?

If we're reshaping American politics, maybe the answer is more cats in D.C?

Who's with me?